THE biplanes that flew a century ago may have had a Cretaceous predecessor. According to an interpretation of the feathered dinosaur Microraptor gui, the creature used a similar configuration to glide gracefully from tree to tree.
It has been suggested that Microraptor spread its arms and legs to form two pairs of gliding wings on the same level, but palaeontologist Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University in Lubbock says this arrangement would have been aerodynamically inefficient. In any case, Microraptor‘s legs could not be splayed sideways. Chatterjee thinks instead that the dinosaur held its legs under its body like modern avian raptors, so that the…
